Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Nadine Gordimer’ category

Nadine Gordimer – The Lying Days

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Reading Nadine Gordimer’s first novel The Lying Days (1953) is a bit like being introduced to someone you’ve been wanting to meet for a long time. There’s a huge amount of expectation involved and not just a little preconceived notion. I was uneasy to start that first page, nervous she wouldn’t live up to all I’ve decided she already is. 

Thankfully, I wasn’t at all disappointed. All of her subsequent accomplishments can be easily spotted in the pages of this first sampling of her art. As much as the term can annoy me with its ability to reduce a larger work into some easily pocketable catch-phrase, The Lying Days is a coming-of-age novel. Our narrator Helen will grow up in these pages, discover herself, discover the world and come to contemplate her own substance.  

The novel begins with a vivid evocation of both transgression and trespass. Young Helen, maybe 7 or 8, quarrels with her mother and as a result ventures out of her safe white community into the roiling and colorful atmosphere of a nearby township. This first voyage into a place she should not be is a visceral experience for our narrator, both frightening and exciting, that serves as a template for the rest of the novel – the sensual and intellectual delight of contravention.  

Gordimer is interested in the space where the political and the emotional interact. This is where her characters really come to life. This first novel makes that very clear. However, it doesn’t merge the two as seamlessly as most of her later work. But what The Lying Days does reveal, quite splendidly, is Gordimer’s uncanny perception into those unique moments of human interaction. 

I could nearly pick a page at random and find something similar but this particular passage struck me – these lines come from when Helen has left her family and set up a new life in Johannesburg:

So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.  

Where the first sections of the book remain subtly political, the second half is intensely so. Helen becomes involved with a man who is passionately fighting against the newly elected National Party and their policy of apartheid. These sections do lose some of “Helen’s story” in a larger sense but they are still quite fascinating. And the events she witnesses shape her as much as her love affair and her friendships. By the end of the book, Helen has become a complicated character who comes into her own both powerfully and honestly.  

Beginning Gordimer

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This is my year reading South African writer Nadine Gordimer. My first experience with Gordimer’s writing came about five or six years ago when I read The Pick Up. That novel, with its subtle courage and inimitable prose, made me an instant admirer of a writer I would come to esteem more than any other. Her writing is thick – textured and nuanced, complicated and beautiful. Her subjects are always morally challenging and she extends that challenge beyond her novels through the creation of engaging human/humane characters. 

I am about to finish up her first novel, The Lying Days, published in 1953 when she was thirty years old. To say that I am impressed is a gross underestimation of how awed I actually am at the near perfection of her project, for both its writing and its political preoccupation. This example of her earliest work reveals all the wonderful potential of the writer she will grow to be, making me even more excited to continue my chronological journey through her literature.  

Here is an excerpt from her 1991 Nobel Prize Banquet Speech:

Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations. We writers do not have the encouragement and mateyness I imagine, and even observe, among people whose work is a group activity. We are not orchestrated; poets sing unaccompanied, and prose writers have no cue on which to come in, each with an individual instrument of expression to make the harmony or dissonance complete. We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone. From this paradoxical inner solitude our writing is what Roland Barthes called ‘the essential gesture’ towards the people among whom we live, and to the world; it is the hand held out with the best we have to give.

short fiction – Nadine Gordimer

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I thought I might start something new here at Logophilia and see if I can’t make it into a bit of a tradition, or at least a regularly recurring piece. What I’d like to instate is a weekly short fiction review. I read a considerable number of short pieces per month but never force myself to think too much about them afterward. But I’m keen to change that and spend some more time exploring short fiction.  

I have mentioned before that Nadine Gordimer is one of my all-time favorite authors and she will do quite nicely for this first installment. Gordimer is a South African writer and remains true to her roots, examining the intricacies of her culture and its painful past. She creates unique situations, fraught with dilemma and hampered by personal weakness. I come away from her fiction feeling that I’ve just faced up to some terribly difficult decision or confronted a human failing. Her characters surprise and astound me but never leave me behind, something that a lot of other ‘difficult’ fiction does. In that sense, I consider her a writer concerned with humanity in a larger sense even if her fiction centers almost completely on South Africa. 

A few months back I found a collection of Gordimer’s stories in my local 2nd hand bookshop called Six Feet of the Country. Having only read her novels until now, I snatched it up quickly. The title story concerns a single event in the lives of a recently transplanted urban couple on their farm just outside Johannesburg. One night, the husband (also the narrator) is called to their servants’ quarters under the ruse that one of the servant children are sick. What he finds is the dead body of a young man. It turns out the young man is the brother of one of the workers but an illegal immigrant from Pretoria who took sick along the perilous journey to find his way to what he hoped would be a better life. While the actual story couldn’t be simpler, Gordimer cleverly infuses its barebones plot with historical/cultural significance and the mournful notes of marital discord: 

When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension’, they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a black man won’t stand aside for a white man. 

I got up awkwardly as she watched me – how is it I always feel a fool when I have deserted her bed? After all, I know from the way she looks at me when she talks to me at breakfast next day that she is hurt and humiliated at my not wanting her – and I went out, clumsy with sleep. 

As the story continues, the reader begins to realize just what this narrator is really about. We read on – wary, appalled, and transfixed – as he deals with the death as well as his wife’s reaction to it and then struggles with his responsibility to act on behalf of his workers when they must confront the South African bureaucracy to arrange a proper burial for the young man.  Amazingly, Gordimer gets right inside this white man’s persona and manages, in just a few short pages, to slice apartheid South Africa open and expose its lopsided workings.

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